


The Gift

by firecat



Category: Original Work
Genre: Anal Sex, Devotion, Falling In Love, Gods, Human Sacrifice, Human/Snake Sex (non-penetrative), Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort - Simultaneous, Injury, M/M, Masochism, Multi, Oral Sex, POV First Person, Propitious Erections, Public Sex, Rituals, Sadism, Sex with Sentient Animals, Snakes, Sssnake Ssspeech, Submission, Telepathy, Transformation, Worship, magical healing, symbiosis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:22:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 12,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27770692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firecat/pseuds/firecat
Summary: Madan, of the Temple of the Dark Gods, has his greatest wish fulfilled: He is chosen as a human sacrifice to the God known as the Cruel One.He could not have begun to imagine what awaited him when they met.
Relationships: Cruel Deity/His Naive Worshipper, Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Comments: 18
Kudos: 42
Collections: Heart Attack Exchange 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yelp](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yelp/gifts).



> Thanks for the great prompts!
> 
> See end notes for warnings (which contain spoilers)

“One of the Dark Gods has marked your family,” said the priest. “He may claim you or your other children, unless you act.”

He wore a black garment that covered his whole body, even his face. Only his feet — the part most visible to me from my hiding spot under the bed where my dead sister lay — were bare. They were dusty and callused. 

My mother sobbed in grief and fear.

The Dark Gods were spoken of only in whispers and euphemisms, with warding gestures, for fear that naming them would draw their attention. Disease, killing weather, and famine were among their domains. My sister was the second of my family to be taken by the wasting disease that had also killed my father. This was why the priest had spoken.

“What must I do to save us? My son and daughter?” she whispered.

“You must offer one of your children as a Gift. To the Gentle One,” said the priest. “The signs show he is the one who marked your family.”

I could not see my mother, but I knew the warding gesture she must have made then, touching her forehead with the backs of her hands and then quickly thrusting them to the side and backward. “The Gen— My child...No! Not that!” she cried.

“Think carefully, esteemed mother,” said the priest, respectfully but implacably. “If you do not, he will take whom he pleases. As he has taken your husband and your daughter. He might take you, and what would your children do then? The city streets are not kind to orphans.”

My mother gasped.

“It will be better if you offer one of your children as a Gift. Your son, perhaps. He will come to our Temple, be taught our ways and our skills. He will know who he belongs to and embrace it. If he is Chosen as a sacrifice, it will be his greatest wish come true. But few are Chosen, and he is likely to live out his full life, in service.”

“Would...would I at least be able to see him?”

“Alas, no,” said the priest. “We of the Temple are called Forgotten, and have no existence except as Gifts. We wear these coverings when we are outside the Temple so that no one knows one of us from another.”

“What skills would he learn?” my mother said suddenly, as if it mattered to her.

The bed creaked above me. The priest had been sitting on it, as if it bothered him not at all to share the surface with a dead body.

Then I remembered why it didn’t bother him.

“You know the answer,” the priest answered mildly. “We do what is unsafe and unclean for the rest of the people. We tan the leather, we handle the dead, we sweep the streets. Your son, if he is Given, will learn these skills, and others I may not speak of.”

I wondered what they were, these secret skills. 

~~~

Thus, as a boy of twelve years, I came to the Temple of the Dark Gods. I was Given to the one the priest had named Gentle to my mother. That was not the name we called him inside the Temple. He was the Cruel One, and he had another name, which we never spoke except in solemn ritual. 

Perhaps my becoming his Gift appeased him, for my mother and sister thrived. I saw them occasionally in the square when I was sweeping, my face and body hidden under the black garment we wore outside the Temple. They were sometimes with a man who had frequented the house while my father and sister were ill. I came to realize that my mother chose to Give me to the Temple because she was to enter his house, and he didn’t want a boy around who might challenge his authority. My sister, however, he was willing to tolerate.

I was not supposed to think about such things. We were at all times to keep our thoughts on our training, and on our work, and on the Gods to whom we were Given. And gradually I did stop thinking about them. Since I could no longer be part of that world, its hold on me relaxed, little by little, until there was scarcely any tether at all.

I was a curious boy, and tetherless. No wonder my mind was ripe for capturing.


	2. Chapter 2

Some years into my training, I began to learn the skill of copying manuscripts. Upon entering one of the Temple libraries, where I had been dispatched on an errand, I saw a young man about my age, who had been Given to the Cruel God not long after I had. His face was round and dusted with freckles, and he had a head of thick black hair. He was bent over a manuscript, poring over it with such concentration that his mouth hung slightly open. 

He looked up at the sound of my footsteps. When he saw me, his eyes looked me up and down. He pursed his lips as if pondering a question about me. Suddenly, he gestured at me. 

I was not supposed to allow myself to be distracted from my task, but I crept quietly to him.

“Ata,” I greeted him. In the outside world, we were Forgotten and nameless, but in the Temple we had names, for convenience’s sake.

“Madan,” he greeted me back. He indicated the manuscript he had been studying. “Look at what’s in the margin here.”

I peered at the manuscript. The light was dim in the library, so as not to damage the fragile works. From the color of the ink and vellum, from the style of the calligraphy, I guessed that this manuscript was several hundred years old, at least. 

In the margin I could barely make out some words that had been written, before an attempt had been made to scrub them off.

> _Though in dark, I am alight.  
>  Though chilled, I am ablaze.  
>  Though consumed, I am reborn.  
>  I am reborn in your arms, ——  
>  The Taking becomes the Gift. _

There was a word after “arms” that had been scrubbed harder and was almost invisible. I strained to make it out, but I could not.

Ata gave me a wide-eyed look, then took a dry quill and traced over the scrubbed spot. I knew then what the word was, and my mouth dropped open. It was the true name of the Cruel One.

A thrill shivered up my spine. I imagined the copyist, centuries ago, working secretly by candlelight, writing these words of devotion. The daring it must have taken to write the name of my God. I felt the little poem laid bare the truth of what we were, as Gifts. I was suddenly thirsty with the desire to try to write that name myself. 

Ata saw my reaction. He nodded excitedly and his eyes widened. They were blue, I realized. His face glowed from within, and I knew he shared the nature of my devotion to the Cruel One. I was not the only one whose secret imaginings of the act of sacrifice left my body burning.

The very next night, I visited the library in secret. I wanted to look in every manuscript I could lay my hands on, in the hopes I would find more of the devotional poet’s illicit marginalia.

On my third visit to the library in the small hours, I was standing on a chair pulling at a manuscript over my head, when I heard a sharp sound. I startled and stumbled, and the heavy book fell to the floor with a thud. I leapt off the chair and was seeking cover when a head full of yellow curly hair barreled into my stomach and I was knocked over.

“Oof!” 

The owner of the hair had also been knocked down by the collision. I recognized her — another who was Given shortly after me, although she was a couple of years older. Her wrists and throat bore the same tattoos mine did, marking her as a Gift for the Cruel One.

“Shai! What are you —“

“Madan! What are you —“ she said simultaneously. Then she saw the manuscript on the floor beside me. Her eyes narrowed, took in my face, and then lit up with understanding. 

“It was Ata, wasn’t it?” she said. “He showed you —“

“The marginalia?”

She nodded vigorously. “I thought so.” She spoke quickly in her excitement. “He showed it to me a week ago, and I’ve been sneaking in here every night since. I started at the beginning of the alphabet. That“ — she indicated the manuscript I’d dropped — “is shelved in the Bs. I’ve already looked through that one. I’m on the Gs now. I’ll show you what I’ve found so far and then we can work together.”

~~~

Ata, Shai, and I were not often apart after that, whenever we had a moment to sneak away. 

In the Temple, ones like us were called Late-Given, and we were marked out as different.

The Late-Given, those of us who were Given as older children, when ill fortune struck our families, knew two ways of life — that of the people and that of Temple. We were half in one world, and half in another, belonging fully to neither. Thus we saw the way predators do, parallax views delivering dimensional vision. From that lonely vantage, we became observers, scholars, seekers. And some of us became devoted to our Gods to the point of obsession. 

In contrast, those Given as infants, the most numerous of us, knew no life other than that of the Temple. They tended to be rules-oriented and unquestioning. They called themselves True-Given, and although the priests frowned upon it, they viewed the rest of us as unworthy imposters.

We were pariahs among pariahs. And that only made us cling more fiercely to each other. And to the God we belonged to.

In the year that followed the discovery of our commonality, we created a secret cult of three. We gave each other ominous nicknames. Found ways to weave hidden messages of devotion into our black garb. Stole small quantities of vision herbs from the storeroom and took them at night, telling our chaotic dreams to each other the next day.

The Temple’s restrictions on sexual touching intensified our obsessions.

We told each other stories about being taken by the Dark Ones, being overwhelmed with their unearthly beauty, their erotic appetites. And then we broke the restrictions — alone in our scarce moments of privacy, or, rarely and luxuriously, when we could sneak away to the hidden spots we knew, with each other. 

~~~

Ata’s face, his whole body, was tight, and I could tell it was not with pleasure. I tried to soothe him with a gentle touch, but he flinched away as if I’d struck him.

It was about a year since our menage-a-trois had formed. The three of us had found a reliably less-frequented spot in the Temple that we retired to when we weren’t studying or performing duties.

Ata often struggled during the endurance training we underwent.

“I don’t know how you stand it, Madan,” he said. “I don’t mind the dark. Or the restraints. But the _pain._ It frightens me so. I feel that I’m going mad, that I’d do anything to get away from it. And it’s getting worse, not better. I can’t take as much as I could at first. It’s like I generate the pain in my own mind before I’m even touched.”

I was sympathetic, but I didn’t know how he felt. I too generated the pain in my mind before I was touched, but I had an entirely different response to it.

“Madan doesn’t just stand it,” Shai told Ata. “He’s excited by it.”

Shai’s hand snaked inside my robe and closed around my cock. It awoke quickly. The endurance training had aroused me but left me unsatisfied. 

Heat suffused my face. I didn’t realize she had noticed my reactions to the pain sessions. But it was true. The dark, the blindfold, the restraints, all of those aspects of endurance training, which terrifed or enraged some of us, only relaxed me. But the pain excited me. I loved the birch sticks and knotted leather thongs, the sharp implement we called the cats-claws, the lightning bowl.

Shai continued to stiffen my cock. What she hated about the endurance sessions was being restrained. She was always desperate afterward to take control of her body back. For her, freedom from restraint meant making herself come hard. She pushed me to the floor on my back. “I need to ride you, Madan,” she told me. “Ata, get over here. Your cock’s not going to suck itself.”

Shai sunk her nails into my chest as she came, and the sharp pain made me burst inside her. Ata, standing over me with his cock in Shai’s mouth, reached his climax at the same time. He pulled out and spattered over her face, my belly.

After that, we were all a lot more relaxed for a while.


	3. Chapter 3

The most wonderful and terrible event in the life of the Temple came when a Gift was Chosen and prepared for sacrifice. 

Exactly what sacrifice entailed was a great secret and mystery. Even the cleverest among us, despite employing their considerable wiles to discover the truth, did not know.

Oh, we knew the first act. The Preparation. And we knew a little about the second act. The Journey. A few had failed to complete it, had wandered back to the city, or been found on the road. Some must have been captured on the way, for they had come back into the city as slaves with their new masters.

But what happened to those who completed the Journey, we knew not. Because no one who completed it came back. Or sent word.

There were a thousand thousand rumors. The God consumed the sacrifice. The God took the sacrifice to a dark place and imprisoned them there. The God took the sacrifice to a great, lavish palace, where they waited on the God and shared in their luxury and comfort. 

But no one knew.

Over the centuries, our scholars pored over the manuscripts of the ancients who had started our clan, in the days when the Dark Gods ruled the Earth.

We read the entrails of birds and the eight-armed beings of the sea. We built traps for the sunlight at its yearly zenith and the sunlight at its yearly peak. We tracked the phases of the moon and the journeys of the wandering stars. We tried to call on the spirits of the dead, using noise, darkness, sex, fasting, dreams, concoctions that gave visions.

All to no avail. Still no one knew what happened to those Given.

~~~

“The Dark Sun is coming soon,” announced the Temple Astronomer. 

Of all the people, only those of our Temple knew how to predict the coming of the Dark Sun, and how properly to mark it with ritual.

The Astronomer went on, explaining what we already knew. “The Dark Gods periodically block the sun to remind us of their power. They must be propitiated. These are some of our greatest and most solemn rituals. And a Sacrifice will be Chosen.”

Most of us had never experienced a Dark Sun. Only a Dark Moon, which was similar, but much less powerful, according to the elders who had seen both. 

Who would be Chosen? In the days leading up to the announcement, we buzzed with speculation, for all that it was frowned upon. Everyone I spoke to or overheard had an opinion. Many had several opinions. 

I never thought I would be Chosen. I was younger than some of the Gifts, who were also more skilled than I was. Surely my God would want the most skilled or knowledgeable? And, I thought, I was not so young that my youth itself would be appealing to the Cruel One. I was deeply devoted to him, but not as much as Ata was. Possibly not even as much as Shai. 

I just didn’t stand out in any way. Except the one. 

When the day came and the entirety of the Temple was in attendance in the Preparation Hall, all dressed in our finest robes, I stood at the back and craned to see over the heads of the tallest. I felt envy for the person who would stand on the stage soon, accepting their fate, rejoicing that their greatest desire was to be fulfilled. I felt envy even though they hadn’t been chosen yet.

My mind filled with the buzzing of the crowd’s conversation. (Conversation during this ritual was forbidden. That didn’t stop us, and the priests seemed reluctant to intervene.) I seemed to lose track of myself. I was walking hot desert sands in a rocky landscape. I was licking water trickling down the face of a rock. I was lying on the ground, in the dark, and something heavy was coiled on my chest.

The buzzing abruptly became much louder, and I was jostled by people on all sides. I heard my name being spoken over and over again. I let hands push me forward until I was next to the stage, then I grasped the hands of the head priest and was lifted onto it. 

“Madan has been Chosen as the sacrifice,” he intoned. “He is to travel to the abode of the Cruel One.”

I blinked stupidly into the crowd. 

“I will now tear off Madan’s garment, for he is to be torn from his life among us. He will remain bare until the first of the rituals tomorrow. None may touch him until that time.”

The priest seized hold of my robe and ripped it down the front. It pooled at my feet, and I stepped away from it. 

The priest bade me turn in a circle so that all could see me. I heard murmurs, exclamations, and cheers. When I looked down at myself I saw why. My cock was standing upright and absolutely rigid. 

It was taken as a propitious sign.

~~~

To undergo Preparation was to enjoy the best of what the Temple could offer, for a period of days, depending on which God the sacrifice was dedicated to. I feasted, I drank, I wore splendid ritual garments. 

To undergo Preparation was also to be on public display at all times, in the Preparation Hall. The hall, used only for this purpose, became the venue for a days-long party. I was allowed to be alone when I relieved myself, but I was assisted or witnessed when I did anything else — sleeping, bathing, exercising, and especially indulging my sexual appetites. 

Preparation was the only time we were allowed to join with each other (although many of us did it at other times, in secret), and any such activity had to take place in the hall. Needless to say, there was a lot of fucking during Preparation. 

It occurred to me more than once, during the days that followed, that the relentlessly public nature of the Preparation worked to prevent the one Chosen from running away from their duty. Which meant that it had probably happened one or more times in the past, although I knew I would never find proof of it.

I, however, had no intention of running away. I would have undergone anything for a chance to meet my God. I hoped only I would be allowed to look upon him before being Sacrificed. 

Ata and Shai and I fucked each other once in the Preparation Hall, but after several years of secret assignations, doing it in public felt strange. After that, I sought out no one, but granted my seed to whomever wished it, as was the expectation, and was kept quite occupied as a result. It had been a while since a young man had been Chosen, especially one with some experience of the world outside the Temple. There were no mirrors, but I’d been told I was tolerably handsome. And apparently my readiness had made quite an impression that first night.

So most of my days of Preparation passed in a blur of physical pleasure. I didn’t keep count, but it seemed everyone in the Temple took my cock into their mouth or another part of their body more than once. 

At last came the final night. Although the party continued in the Hall, the Chosen was to spend this night alone in the Preparatory Chamber, in meditation. 

There, very late, when the revelers had mostly gone back to their cells, or lay passed out in the Hall, Shai and Ata visited me for the final time.

They weren’t supposed to be there, and I didn’t really want them there. But I didn’t object. I had started to get used to thinking of myself as something to be granted to others.

It was difficult. Because they were full of emotions that I was supposed to be purging myself of. 

“I wish I had been Chosen,” said Shai enviously, tossing her blonde curls. “You certainly get spoiled with all the feasting and everyone throwing themselves at you.” She writhed her hips to clarify what she meant by that. “And then you go on an adventure. I want an adventure.”

“Even if death awaits at the end?” said Ata. His dark brows knit together. “I’m so terribly sad, Matan. I don’t want this to be our last night together.” Tears welled in his eyes, wetted his freckled cheeks. 

“You know it’s not death, Ata,” I said. “It’s being Given. Fulfilling our greatest purpose.”

I didn’t mention my fears that those might be one and the same thing. I was supposed to be purging myself of them.

I embraced Ata, and then Shai wanted to be part of the embrace too. 

“If it’s to be our last night together, let’s make the most of it,” I said. I kissed Ata, and then Shai, and then they kissed each other. The robes we wore suddenly seemed much too cumbersome. 

We tried to be quiet as we gave each other pleasure, but there were many moments when anyone in the Hall could have heard our cries. Nevertheless, no one disturbed us. 

Just before dawn, Ata and Shai left the chamber, holding hands. I was glad that they would have each other to comfort and touch after I was gone.

I was alone at last. It had been a sweet farewell, but my mind was already ahead of my body on its journey.


	4. Chapter 4

I followed the map the navigators had created for me. The journey was long and arduous, and I discovered as I traveled that some of the unreturned had indeed not completed it, had performed as sacrifices without so much as meeting their god. 

As I got closer to where I knew I was to go, the climate changed. Out of forests I came to grasslands. From grasslands to rocky hills. 

Only a few more hours now, I told myself as I set off after a brief night’s rest. I strained my eyes for what I imagined would be a great fortress or Temple dedicated to the god, but I saw nothing. Nevertheless, I continued on my way, trusting in the instructions for the journey that other Gifts had followed throughout the centuries. 

I soon realized I had miscalculated the length of today’s journey. I ran out of water before the sun peaked in the sky. After several hours in the heat, I was so thirsty I could scarcely put one foot in front of the other. But continue to walk I must, because no water lay under my feet where I stood.

I walked. And then I smelled it. The moisture in the air. I heard it, a faint trickling sound, different from the crunch of rocks under my feet, the hiss of wind through the dry scrub, the chitterings of insects and small scavenging things. 

I saw it, a copse of small trees and greenery in the golden landscape. I made for it, and my fatigue seemed to grow now that my goal was in sight. 

Just as I reached the edge of the green, I fell.

Not down, but in.

An image flashed before my eyes. The head of a man, or was it a snake? Great limpid eyes gazing at me. Pitiless, but there was curiosity in them. 

Then the breath was knocked out of me and my mind went black for a time.

Coming to, I found myself in a pit. I could see the entrance far above, the covering of grasses partially knocked aside by my descent.

Uninjured, I might have climbed out.

But my ankle screamed at me when I tried to stand. My foot was twisted under me at an unnatural angle. 

I fell again, landing on my side, and despair took me for some moments. Then I remembered the teachings. I turned my head upward and spoke into the gathering dark.

“Dark God, Cruel One,” I prayed. “I am your worshipper, your sacrifice. If this is how I am to serve you, dying in this pit, so be it. If not, I ask for your help, that my sacrifice properly nourish you.” 

I turned my head back again, and that’s when I saw it. The small but steady trickle of water, entering through a crack in the rock and exiting through a different crack, but for a few precious inches open to the air and to my thirsty tongue. 

I lay there for a long time lapping at the life-sustaining substance.

In the last of the light, I took my knife and dulled the blade sawing a notch in my staff, then broke it to make a splint. I straightened my ankle — trying but failing to hold in my cries of agony. When I had recovered a little from the pain, I tied the splint to my leg to keep the ankle in position. I wasn’t sure what good it would do. It probably wouldn’t be sufficient to help me climb out of the pit. But it seemed the thing to do at the time. 

It was full dark then. I did not want to use up the last of my light-making supplies. I was hungry but not thirsty. Cold, but too tired to do more than drag a thin blanket out of the pack and cover myself with it. And then I slept.

~~~

I came awake, hearing a noise in the dark. A hissing sound, something being dragged across dry leaves. There was a heady odor to the air, something almost intoxicating, like the smells of sex. 

A voice seemed to speak in my head.

“Worshhhipper.” There was a hissing sibilance to the voice. “Greet your God.”

“Aeus?” I whispered, in awe. Not knowing why I dared to use his name, which was only spoken in the most secret and sacred of rituals. 

“And do you know my other names?” the hissing voice inquired.

“Cruel One,” I said, fear half choking my throat, and hastened to add, “They call you that, who do not understand your holy purposes.”

“Ssss, ssss, ssss,” came the voice, and it was obviously laughter, although it sounded like no laughter I’d ever heard before. “Perhapsss they call me that because they underssstand my purposesss all too well.” 

Shivers ran through my body. I was not sure if they were from fear or excitement, or both.

“There is less difference between fear and excitement than many suppossse,” said the voice. 

“My Lord, you can hear my thoughts?”

“Yesss, my young worshhhipper,” the voice said. “My dedicant. My sssacrifice. Your thoughtsss, your feelingsss, your _body_ are mine to explore.”

Suddenly I was naked. And then I felt something sliding along my belly. Something dry and narrow and slightly rough. Something long, I realized, as it continued sliding up to my throat, across my nipple, and then coiled around my arm. 

I felt overwhelmed with many emotions at once. Excitement. Dread. Revulsion. I faintly heard the hissing chuckle again, and then the thin, sinuous thing had turned around, sliding down my wrist, across my hip, down my leg. When it reached the splint supporting my injured ankle, it paused. 

“Thisss is not good,” the voice said. “A broken sssacrifice?”

“It’s my fault,” I gasped. “I was not careful. I fell into this trap. Please do not blame those who sent me to you.”

“Faultsss, I care not about faultsss,” said the voice. “But I cannot accept you as you are. I shall attempt to heal you. It will hurt, young sssacrifice. I hoped to eassse you into that part of your ssservice to me, but needsss mussst.”

“I am not afraid,” I said.

“Ssss, ssss,” said the voice, laughing again. Then the long thin body wrapped around my ankle, two, three, four times. And _squeezed._

The pain was worse than anything I’d ever felt, even in those trainings which were to harden us to it. I couldn’t help yelping a little when it began. I struggled to hold back my cries, to be still, as I had been taught, but I writhed a little.

“Do not withhold it from me, my sssacrifice,” said the voice. “Your mouth wantsss to scream. Your body wantsss to ssstruggle. _Give me your sssuffering.”_

The pain worsened, and I cried out. I struggled. The heavy coils lying over my body held me fast. I felt that the stricture around my ankle would crush it to dust. The splint cracked. 

I heard hisses and growls. The long, slender body on top of me writhed, as if wracked with some intense sensation. 

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the pain stopped. The pressure around my ankle gave way. The ankle no longer ached. 

“You have done well, young sssacrifice,” said the voice. “I find you worthy.” 

Although my eyes were shut and the pit was pitch black, I seemed to see it again. The head with the great dark eyes that saw into my very soul. 

“I shhhall take only one more thing from you tonight. It will be difficult for you, my Chosssen, but I have expended power in healing you, and must replenisssh it.”

The loops lying on my torso writhed into a new configuration. 

Then I felt it.

Flick-flick. Flick-flick. A light, dry touch on the shaft of my cock. 

It was so unexpected and strange that I gasped. 

“Yesss,” the voice said. “So sssweet already, your uncertainty.”

Something long and thin wrapped itself around my cock...three times. I felt the shaft being tugged gently, that _flicking_ touch against the tip. It began responding to the contact, swelling and growing stiff. But I was too uncomfortable to feel emotional arousal. I only held still, breathing shallowly. 

The tongue began to squeeze rhythmically, a pressure wave that started at the base of my cock and traveled up toward the tip. The rippling sensation was intensely erotic, and I couldn’t help but moan. Before long my cock was harder and longer than it ever had been before, but I was still fighting the fear. Reluctance to give that which it was my very purpose to give. For all the fantasies my friends and I had spun about our God, it had never occurred to me that the Cruel One would demand to use me in such a way. That this particular type of sacrifice would be called for. My mind balked at it. But my body was craving more of it. 

“Ssso beautiful,” the voice said with pride. “Your _reluctant_ pleasure. A ssspecial gift indeed. I take it from you gladly.”

The tongue began writhing around my cock faster, tugging harder. Pleasure, fear, denial spiked through me. I cried out, and I didn’t know if I was crying from pleasure or begging that the pleasure stop. 

“Noooo!” I screamed, and although I couldn’t see anything, I knew that the Cruel One was taking exactly what he required of me. Although I had been trained to believe I belonged to him body and soul, this was still an _unwilling_ sacrifice, and he found it sweet and delicious.

The orgasm tore through me, releasing spurt after spurt of come from my tortured cock. 

The tongue slowly unwrapped itself from my member. Hissing filled my ears and I could _hear_ the satisfaction in it.

“You have pleased and nourished me,” the voice said. “Tomorrow your journey will be at an end, my sssweet sssacrifice. Sssleep now.”


	5. Chapter 5

I awoke with a start. Light had returned and was filtering into the pit from a gray sky.

I shook my head, trying to clear it of the far-too-disturbing dream.

But if it had only been a dream, why was the splint I had rigged last night lying broken next to my ankle? Why did my ankle look as if it had never been damaged at all, not even a bruise?

And why was I naked under the thin blanket I’d pulled from my pack? My clothes lay a few feet away, neatly folded in a manner I had never learned.

Not to mention that my belly was sticky with come.

I put these thoughts aside, because it was useless to speculate while stuck in a pit. I dressed, ate the last of the dried meat from my pack, restowed my things, and then began to ponder climbing out.

But no sooner had I managed to wedge myself against the first exposed tree root in the side of the pit, than I saw several faces peering down at me from the top of it.

I recognized them as Talaran. And was hit with a fresh wave of fear and anger, because the Talarans were slave traders, and I was an outsider, and I was stuck in a pit they’d undoubtedly created for the very purpose of capturing outsiders to subdue and sell. 

I dropped to the bottom of the pit again, hoping to buy myself some time.

Before long, though, they had tied me and dragged me out of there anyway. My options for resisting seemed limited, as there were three of them, and they had weapons. They didn’t want me injured to the point of uselessness as a slave, which would have given me some advantage — except that I didn’t want to be injured to the point of being unable to travel, should I manage to escape them. 

When faced with an opponent bigger and stronger than you are, try to look bigger and stronger yourself, I’d been taught. Intimidation doesn’t always work, but it usually doesn’t hurt, either.

So I tried something.

I jerked, and rolled my eyes around in their sockets, and made what I hoped were scary sounds. 

The slave hunters stepped back, but kept hold of the lead wrapped around my neck, which had already given me a good case of rope burn when I’d tried to resist their putting it on me.

“Beware, for I belong to Aeus, the Cruel God!” I shouted. “None who touch his property shall live! In the name of Aeus, I curse you!”

I didn’t know how much of this speech the slave hunters would understand. But they visibly reacted to the name Aeus, shrinking back in consternation. A hasty conference followed. I knew only the trading pidgin for communication with Talarans, so I was unable to follow, but I thought I picked out the words “no,” “dangerous,” “death,” and “eel delicacy.”

The conference ended, and the leader of the group yanked on the lead around my neck. Apparently the threats to sic Aeus on them had not sufficiently impressed him.

I stumbled forward. Tried one more time. 

“Aeus, I am yours! Protect me!”

The leader yanked on me again, stepped under a tree, and suddenly vanished into its branches. My lead dropped to the ground.

Strangled cries issued from the thick foliage, turning to choking sounds. And then the body of the leader dropped from the tree. He had been crushed around the throat and middle so hard that the flesh there looked like jelly.

The other two slave hunters tried to make a run for it, and I ran in the opposite direction.

_“STOP.”_

The voice seemed to come from inside my head and the command in it was so utterly compelling that I could not make my body obey any contradictory instructions from my brain. I froze. 

So, I saw, had the hunters.

And then, under the tree where the slave trader’s body lay, stood a man.

Or at least it looked like a man, at first glance.

Another glance was sufficient to show that this was no mere man. 

I couldn’t have put into words or pictures what the difference was. I could only feel it.

And again, none of the what I and the other Gifts had imagined, in our fantasies or our poetry, came even close. 

He was taller than the usual man. Maybe seven feet. Lean. Black straight hair that fell over one eye. His skin was subtly patterned all over in beiges and browns, like a sidewinder’s. 

Those features were strange, but not beyond the pale. It was probably his one visible eye that communicated his inhumanity the most strongly. 

The iris was red and the pupil slitted like a cat’s. He stood more than 20 feet away from me, and I shouldn’t have been able to see such detail, but it was also as if that eye were gazing directly into mine from inches away. And that eye knew all my secrets. My fear, my loss, my humiliation. My joys, my struggles. My pain. And my submission. 

I found myself on my knees, at first fighting back tears, and then letting them spill unheeded down my face, making little dark dents in the dust around me. 

On the other side of him, the slavers were likewise groveling in the dust. Then they fell on their faces and lay still. I had no idea whether they still lived. 

There was a small smile on his face now. A knowing smile. 

“Matan,” he said, and hearing my name on his lips was like having my heart pulled from my chest. “My Gift.”

I would have done anything for him. Rent myself to pieces, if he’d asked it.

But he only said, “Rise, and come to me.”

I approached him, aware that my ankle was whole again, knowing his power had healed it.

The closer I came, the more my body shivered and trembled. 

His smile was broader now.

“Your awe, your fear are delicious to me,” he said. His voice didn’t have the sibilance it did when he had been in snake form, but I recognized it nonetheless. It was midnight and velvet.

I didn’t think I was in reach of him yet, but suddenly I was aware of the touch of his hand on my shoulder. Then I was before him, and only his hands on my upper arms kept me upright. 

“Look at me,” he said, because my face was turned away to hide my longing. His voice held an unexpectedly tender note.

I looked into his face, and could not help letting out a gasp. The pain tore at me. Not because he was hurting my body. I hurt because I could not be inside him. Part of him. My flesh was a barrier to my knowing all of him, and that truth was impossible and unbearable. 

“I know I am overwhelming to you now,” he said, and his voice held both regret and satisfaction. “But you will grow a little more used to me in time. I will take the smallest taste of you now, and then bring you...home.”

He bent and his mouth touched mine. My body was wracked with something beyond pain and pleasure. My vision went pure white and then black.


	6. Chapter 6

I awoke in an austere, sunny room. There was a pitcher and glass of what looked like water on a table next to the bed I was lying in. 

I was very thirsty, so I sat up in bed, drank the water in the glass, and poured some more from the pitcher. The door opened then. In came a figure, completely covered by a drab yellow robe, except for thin hands, which were a slightly darker color than the robe. 

“Who are you? Where am I?” I asked as the figure began straightening the blankets I had lain under. 

They put two fingers over where their mouth would be — assuming they were human. “Shhhh.”

“We cannot speak to each other?”

A shake of the head. Then they were gone, leaving more water and some food behind. 

I ate and drank. Then I felt sleepy again, although it had been only a few hours since I had awakened. I’ve been on an arduous journey, I told myself, and gave in to my fatigue. 

~~~

I had been there for several days, in the small house and its grounds, and I had seen nothing of the Dark God. But several of the yellow-clad people — servants? acolytes? — were there. They tended to me. Showed me, without words, parts of the compound I could explore. Warned me, in signs and gestures, against parts forbidden to me. They invited me to take part in certain tasks, which I did gladly, since I needed mental and physical exercise to help recover from the journey. 

One of the tasks was copying a manuscript, something I’d also done at the Temple. This manuscript was written in the scholars’ language that I knew, but although I knew the words, I could not make sense of their meaning. So it did not help me learn more about the Cruel One. 

Rays of afternoon sun passing through the open window warmed my back. Insects chirred and birds sang. I was starting to feel drowsy and thinking of getting up to walk in the gardens for a while.

Then I felt it. At first only a small thrill of sensation down my spine. Then my body flushed all over, and it was not from the heat of the sun. My head fell back and my eyes closed.

He was here. Not in the flesh, but in my mind. The vision was so vivid that the difference scarcely mattered. 

“Madan. Gift,” he said. His voice was hoarse.

“Aeus,” I gasped.

“I cannot be with you yet, except like this,” he said, speaking inside my mind.

“All I am is yours,” I said. It was only the absolute truth.

“I do not take your pain or reluctance today. I will take only your pleasure. Your touch. Your worship. Come to me.”

He hauled me out of the chair of the little writing room, and backed me against the wall. His gaze fixed me, searing. He held my cheeks in both of his large hands and kissed me, pressing up against my body.

I say kissed, but it was more like being devoured, the way his lips came back to mine again and again, the way his tongue sought mine, explored deep into my mouth. He growled and hissed, and each sound tore an answering groan from me. 

His hands found mine and clasped them, raising them over my head, then he was holding me to the wall with his body. His skin was as hot as desert sands at noon. He ground his hips against my belly.

Without letting go of my hands, he kissed my neck, my chest. The robe I was wearing had vanished. My body shivered and shuddered as he bit at my nipples, then sank onto his knees to lick my stomach, pulling my hands behind me as he embraced my hips. 

He bent over further, mouthing my thighs, rubbing his face against them, creeping upward until his tongue ran over my balls. He lavished them with attention, pulling them into his mouth. 

Then his hands pulled mine forward until the base of my cock was nestled into our palms. He took the tip and shaft deep into his mouth and began to suck. 

I could not have imagined my God doing this to me. It felt as if he would pull out of me not just my seed but my very soul. I would have let him. Could not refuse him. 

For an unfathomable time, I hung at that point just seconds before climax — my whole body aching to come, my cock so hard I feared it would split open. He kept me there with brief sharp sucking at the head, squeezing my hands to tighten and tug at the base. It was simultaneously the most pleasurable and most excruciating moment I’d ever experienced. 

My head was swimming and I felt I would pass out. My mouth opened and a plea tore from me:

“Mercy!”

Everything went still and silent for a brief moment, as if I’d stopped time with my prayer. 

Then he groaned and his tongue was lapping the head of my cock again, and he was sucking, harder this time, and squeezing.

“Surrender to me,” he said, speaking directly to my mind. 

I came so hard I felt I would die from it. I felt him drinking me, and to give myself to him was to fulfill my every purpose in life.

For an unfathomable period of time I was aware of nothing but his presence in my mind. When he had first come to me, in the pit, he had been a hungry, cruel thing. Now the presence that surrounded me was warm. Almost satisfied.

A coughing sound disturbed me. My eyes came open and I saw one of the yellow robed figures standing in the doorway. Then I realized I was sitting at the copying desk. I’d pulled my robe up and my hand was around my detumescing and sticky cock. 

My body flushed with shame and embarrassment. 

The figure surprised me by speaking — the first time any of them had done so.

“Good,” they said. “You are almost ready.”

Then they turned and walked away.

~~~

The yellow robed figures came to me a few days later. Five of them. They seized me as if they expected me to resist, and I was so surprised that I did struggle a little at first. They were not rough with me, but they were firm, and I gave up struggling. 

They brought me to a chamber, round, carved out of rock. There was a platform in the middle of it, likewise round. Soft and padded. There were eyebolts around it, with chains attached to them, and manacles attached to the chains. The restraints alarmed me until I realized that I was not going to be fastened to them. At least not yet.

They stripped off my clothes and disappeared. 

There was a little light in the room, perhaps sunlight filtered through translucent rock. Eventually it faded, and I was in pitch darkness. 

I remembered back to my training at the Temple. Some of us never learned to tolerate the utter dark. I didn’t mind it. I entered a shallow trance.

Though my ears were attuned to the smallest sounds, I heard nothing. My first inkling of his presence was a sigh of breath on my face. 

“Do you feel my breath?” came a whisper in the dark.

I gasped. “Yes, my God.”

My voice seemed to echo in the chamber.

“Madan. My Gift.” The voice was like a breeze through tall grasses. 

A fleeting touch on my cheek, more than the movement of air. Lips, perhaps. 

“Madan, name me with my true name,” the soft voice said. “As you did when I came for you at the pit.”

I swallowed. My body resisted. My lungs wouldn’t move the air. My throat and mouth wouldn’t shape the word.

“Aeus,” I was able to pronounce at last. 

He sighed, and that exhalation held satisfaction. Relief. Gratitude. 

Tears welled in my eyes. One escaped and slid down my temple. 

A moist tongue flicked against my face and lapped at the wetness. 

“You sense my feelings,” Aeus said, reverence in his voice, as if I were the God, not the other way around. 

The only word in my body was his name, and I whispered it once more.

A hand on my cheek. Large, soft, hot. 

“My attendants told me you...responded to my imaginings,” he said. “Our mind connection is very powerful.”

My breath hitched as I remembered the vision I’d had at the copying desk. The pleasure.

“I almost regret...” Aeus said. His hand had moved to my throat. He didn’t have to squeeze for my breathing to become heavy and strained.

“Regret?” I said. Not a word anyone had ever associated with the Cruel One, to my knowledge.

“My connection with your people is...damaged,” Aeus said. “I have been able to do nothing to heal it.”

He spoke against the hollow between my throat and my collarbone.

I was afraid to ask, but I found myself blurting, “Why, Master?” Surely a God as powerful as the Cruel One...

“I have been weakened by hunger.” His hands rasped in the hair on my chest. His mouth closed over a nipple. 

I bit back a cry of pleasure.

His hand slapped down over my mouth. The contrast between this harshness and his gentleness up to that point did drive a gasp out of me. 

“Madan, do not silence yourself,” he said, in a hard voice. “This place is not your Temple, where you must lie with others in secret. Your pleasure nourishes me. Give it to me.” His voice dropped lower. _“All of it.”_

He loomed over me. I could not see, but I felt it as heat. He captured my nipple in his mouth again, and his hands slid down my sides to my hips, and he sucked.

I cried out loud and long. My need, my worship, my surrender. The chamber seemed to amplify it, not just the sound but the emotions, the sensations in my body. And his as well, as his voice joined mine...

...then, in the midst of it, I felt his teeth on my nipple. He was biting down, not hard enough to draw blood but enough to _hurt._ His fingers had captured my other nipple, twisting and pinching hard, and what was coming out of my mouth was a scream now, a cry of pain transmuted into the keenest pleasure, as I writhed under him. 

The chamber amplified that as well. And from him, I felt shock, surprise, elation. The satisfaction of satiated hunger. And also, a different kind of pleasure. The kind I’d seen sometimes on the faces of the priests who presided over our endurance training. The ones who seemed to enjoy how I responded to pain.

“Madan,” he said urgently. “Transforming pain to such pleasure? Is that indeed your skill? Can it be, that you can feed both my heart and my body? Oh, the Gift you offer me is rich indeed.”

And then Aeus began to make light. 

His skin and eyes glowed. I could see him now, and his smile was everything I’d ever dreamed of in life. If I’d had a dagger at that moment I would have thrust it into my heart, wishing only to die now that I’d experienced perfection. 

Still smiling, he said, “I will not allow you to end yourself,” he said. “You are mine.”

Then he _laughed._ My God, Aeus, laughed. Because of me. I was glad I hadn’t had a dagger to use, because I would not have known that new kind of perfection.

“Exactly, my Gift,” Aeus said, continuing to respond out loud to my interior thoughts. “Your knowledge of perfection is limited to what you’ve known up to now. But now, there is me. There is us. So many new _perfect_ moments to discover.”

He had continued to glow more brightly as we continued our half vocal, half telepathic conversation. Now I saw him lean over me, and I knew he was going to kiss me. 

“I am going to feast on you now, my Gift who makes pleasure from pain.”

And when he did, biting my lips hard, the light he made flared so brightly that it almost hurt, even through my closed eyelids. 

If ecstasy made me light up, maybe he would have had to close his eyes too.


	7. Chapter 7

So much pain.

My slightest movements set it alight along my nerves.

And I could not help but move, to feel it again. Because it was also pleasure. And because it was from him, and belonged to him.

Aeus was inspecting his Gift with care. I was bruised and bitten all over. I burned, deep inside my body, from the lightning released by his fingers. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. 

Also using the strange power in his fingers, he healed my hurts that he considered too damaging to let heal on their own, and he left the others alone. He knew, although I hadn’t told him in words, the pride and determination and pleasure I felt about bearing the discomfort of them, and about wearing the marks he made on me.

He was still glowing, but no longer blinding me. He could control the brightness when he was able to concentrate, he said.

“Aeus, why were you starving?” I asked him as he touched me.

He thought for some moments before he answered. 

“The simplest way to explain it is that I am nourished by certain human emotions. Several Gifts lived with me at any one time, so I could take nourishment without overtaxing any of them. But no new Gifts have arrived for years. The last one died a year ago. I can survive without nourishment for a long time, but it is a mean existence. I must remain in my snake form. And I become…hard and bitter. More like what your people call me. Cruel. As you experienced me, in the pit.”

He bit at one of my bruises. I cried out, and felt his satisfaction. 

I took in what he told me and I felt shocked. “We haven’t sent you enough Gifts? But why haven’t you shown your displeasure? Punished us?”

Aeus chuckled, a low and rich sound that made my belly clench. He pressed his hand against my spine just above the curve of my ass, and I felt a dull ache fade, replaced by tingling warmth. His hand slid lower, and the tingling from his fingers turned to a sting, the warmth to a sensation just underneath searing. I groaned and my cock throbbed hard. 

Aeus gave a throaty growl. He slid his hands between my legs and ran his fingers lightly along my shaft. Tingles. Warmth. I stiffened and grew. 

“Intoxicating,” he said. Again, that reverence.

“Do you remember my saying my connection with your people is damaged?” he continued after a bit more teasing.

“Yes, but I don’t know what you mean by that.”

“I must start at the beginning, then. We arrived on your world long ago — it has traveled around your sun over a thousand times since then. Soon, we discovered your people.” 

He continued ministering to me as he spoke. He was right that I was growing a little more used to him. But only a little. His softest touch caused me to shudder. When I did, he waited until I had recovered, then explored me some more, learning the minutiae of my responses to him. 

“We had knowledge you — your people — did not,” he continued. “Of disease and healing and weather. We helped you. Your emotions were able to nourish us. It became a symbiosis.”

“Aeus,” I said. “We? Do you mean the other Dark Gods?”

“Let us not use that word, ‘God,’ for now, Madan. Just know that I came, and others like me.”

I nodded, although I did not understand. 

“All was well for a time. But we knew nothing of the thing your people call war. The madness that drives you to destroy each other. Such a madness came over your people. The Red Century, your histories call it. No one remembers how it began.”

I nodded again. The manuscripts I had studied were full of stories about its origin. None of the stories agreed.

“But how it ended, I can tell you. The lands that fed your people laid to waste. The diseases you unleashed upon each other, some that even we knew not how to cure. But the worst tragedy was the willful destruction of so much of your knowledge.”

My people, with great knowledge, enhanced by our symbiosis with the— with Aeus’s kind. I tried to imagine it. I could not.

Aeus nodded, as if he’d read my thoughts. 

“Eventually your people began to increase in number again. But they had forgotten what we were. The culture that arose after the wars was suspicious and fearful of outsiders. They remembered our powers and our hungers, but they saw us as terrors. Punishers. Responsible for inflicting that which we sought to alleviate.”

I gazed into his face. I saw so much pain there. As if this had happened yesterday, and not hundreds of years ago.

“We had to move far away, because their suspicion and blame hurt us. But your people believed that we needed to be appeased, so then the Gifts began to come. Human sacrifices, who thought we would kill and eat them, and then we would stop sending diseases and famine to your people.”

“Like me.”

“At first, not like you. They were terrified, and usually half-dead when we found them. We tried to heal them, to create symbiosis with them. But their minds or bodies were too far gone. Most died quickly.”

Sometimes, waking in the night in the Temple, I had imagined such encounters, a Journey gone wrong, and the fear had chilled my bones. All we Gifts had, I thought.

Aeus sensed my remembered fear. He _ate_ it, and glowed brighter briefly. But the colors were muted, as if he also regretted my sorrow. 

“Eventually your Temple came into being, and the training of the Gifts began, and the Gifts who made it here were not so damaged. But it was too little, too late for my companions.”

“Why did they die?”

“I told you that we survive starvation in snake form. One by one, they lost their self-awareness and transformed completely into something like snakes, although our biology is different from the biology of life from this world. Then they lived a few more years, the lifespan of a snake, and died. It is by chance and luck I survived.” 

“Tell me,” I begged.

Aeus opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. His brows knitted. He seemed to be trying to make a decision. 

Finally, he spoke.

“I will warn you it is an unpleasant story. But you should know all that I’m capable of.” He drew in a deep breath. “A human got lost near our dwelling place. He encountered me in snake form and tried to kill me. I bit him. Then I fed on his terror as he died slowly from my poison. That enabled me to survive several weeks longer than my last companion. Until the next Gift arrived.”

I shuddered with horror, imagining the poisoned man dying. Did the Cruel God lie on his chest, like he had on mine in the pit? 

“Yes, I did,” said Aeus. “Because it terrified him more.” 

And then he _ate_ my horror, too, and I felt his cock harden against my thigh. 

I had never become aroused imagining another’s suffering. But knowing that it excited Aeus, my Cruel One, I groaned with want. 

_“Madan,”_ he growled urgently. He hurriedly finished his inspection of my body, and must have decided I was hale enough to endure his attentions once more. He pushed me onto my back and loomed over me, raising my legs to his shoulders. He quickly and roughly penetrated me. His cock was huge and overwhelming inside me. We both cried out, in almost the same voice. 

“How is it, Gift, that when I feed on you, I become hungrier?” he hissed, thrusting into me hard and fast. My thighs stretched painfully as he lowered his mouth to mine, biting my lips.

I had no words. Only white hot ecstasy, as his cock and his tongue seemed to be penetrating my entire body, stimulating every nerve that could register pleasure.

He slowed his assault before he came. Kept rocking into me. His hand closed around my aching cock. 

“How do you want me to torment you?” he said, grinning ferally. 

“Cruel indeed, to make me choose,” I gritted.

“I could squeeze,” he said, demonstrating. “I could scratch…Ah, that made you cry louder than the squeezing, didn’t it? But how about this?” My cock and balls began tingling, burning, as lightning sparked from his fingers. “That makes you scream even more. Gift, _feed me.”_

I would probably have come anyway at that point, but the lightning he was pouring into me increased the intensity so much, I—

~~~

“Madan?”

I blinked my eyes open. 

If I fed on fear, I would have had a meal fit for a king before me, just from looking on Aeus’s face.

I smiled.

He smiled, and the fear was replaced with relief. His hand was spread against my chest. I felt a gentle tingle from it as he checked my body for more damage. 

“Good, you are all right. You passed out.” He began _babbling._ “I am sorry. I don’t yet know enough about what you can endure, and you made me so hungry, and we’re in the amplifying chamber, and —”

“I feel _wonderful,”_ I said drunkenly. I lifted my head to his and kissed him. 

He sighed softly. And something he had been holding inside him, something cold and hard and lonely, seemed to melt and disappear.

That was when it happened.

We had begun as a God and a Gift. That, we still were.

But now we were also two beings in love.


	8. Chapter 8

Weeks passed. I think. It was hard to keep track of time when I was so often in a daze of pain and ecstasy. And Aeus didn’t seem to mark time as I did. To one who lives for centuries, perhaps, a tenth of a year is not worth remarking. 

Aeus and his attendants began teaching me. It was hard work — not the daily labor of it, but stretching my mind to make room for knowledge that turned my view of my world inside out.

The stars, not the heavenly abodes of Gods, but like the world’s sun. 

The minutiae of living bodies, and how knowledge of them could heal. 

The ways to join different substances, to make something with the properties of each, or something entirely different. 

The reason that the Dark Suns and Dark Moons occurred, and why my Temple’s predictions worked. 

I, in turn, told him about my people — the way we thought about our world, our stories, our lives. Things he had not learned, because he and his companions had moved away after they had been named Dark Gods.

Sometimes, we talked about how we might transform my people’s understanding of him.

~~~

“Who are the ones in yellow robes, who scarcely talk to me?” I asked him one day, as he inspected the hurts he’d inflicted on me. “I thought they were Gifts, but you say your Gifts all died.”

He knew my body better now. He didn’t have to heal most of the hurts. I would sting and ache all day, reminders of the satisfaction of feeding him, and being taken to my limits with such consummate skill. 

“They are of my kind, but in potential only, unless I regain more power. They are something like children, or larvae, or worker bees. They are intelligent, but have little self-direction, and need me to guide their activities.”

“If you do regain power, then what?”

“I could quicken some of them, so that they became like me. With the power to heal, and the same needs for nourishment that I have. Now, they are similar to the animals of this world — they eat flesh and plants.”

“If you quickened them, you would no longer be alone,” I noted.

“I am no longer alone now,” he said. He kissed me and for those moments I forgot all but the ecstasy of him.

~~~

I knew my mind was stretching, in those months, but I didn’t notice that I was changing in other ways as well. I only knew that I felt healthy, and strong, and loved. And I had never in my years believed life could be so sweet.

I sometimes took walks in the surrounding countryside. It was empty for miles around. Aeus said he was able to use his powers to discourage curious humans from venturing near. 

On one such trek, I heard a commotion in some dry brush as I passed by. I stepped nearer and a sand fox scampered away, but I still heard noises. I investigated and found a small bird, which had been injured. 

I picked up the bird and sat on the ground, holding it in my hands. I expected it to struggle, but it did not, so I believed it close to death.

Something about this one injured bird, out of all the life in the world, touched my heart with sorrow. It seemed unfair that its life would be shortened because of falling prey to a fox. It made no sense for me to feel this way, I knew. Animals sometimes killed and ate other animals. That was just the way of things. We were not like Aeus’s kind, to be fed by each other’s emotions. But I felt the sorrow anyway. 

I must have fallen into a trance, or dozed. When I came back to awareness, the sun had dropped close to the edge of the sky. I was lying on my back, the bird on my chest, my hands cupped around it to create a protective barrier, although one it could have escaped if it wished.

I sat up and looked at the bird.

It was whole.

It hopped onto my hand and fixed me with a beady eye. Then it was gone, soaring into the sky with great speed.

“It probably wasn’t injured after all,” I told Aeus later. “Maybe it was feigning, to protect its nest. Or I only imagined it was injured. I fell asleep soon after rescuing it.”

Aeus went still and silent. This was uncharacteristic of him.

“There is another possibility,” he said eventually. “You may have started to absorb some of my healing skills.”

I sat bolt upright. “I didn’t do anything to heal the bird!” I said, with more vigor than I expected. Something about what he said had frightened me a little. “And how can I _absorb_ your skills? I am learning how bodies work, so I know a few ways I can set them on a path to healing, but —”

“You are changing,” he said. “After we are together, I don’t have to heal as much of the hurt I give you. You are healing it on your own, faster than a human body usually can. I didn’t realize that the ability extended to healing other creatures, though.”

“But how…?” I repeated.

“I live by symbiosis, or at least that’s one way I can survive, but I don’t know much about how it works. We wanted to study it more, but then the wars came, and after that, all our effort was required just to stay alive. I can only say that the benefits go both ways, by definition. You nourish me with your pain and pleasure, and something of me enters you too. And I don’t mean my cock,” he said, smiling seductively.

The mention of his cock distracted us both for a while.

The next day, our studies of my new healing ability began. 

Aeus met me in the amplifying chamber. We had mostly stopped using it, in favor of more comfortable places, now that we knew my particular mixture of emotions was nourishing enough to him without it.

“Why here?” I asked.

“To heighten your new abilities,” he said. 

He produced a knife. I gasped because I thought he was going to cut me with it, and he’d never done that before, preferring to use his hands and teeth and the lightning in his fingers. 

But instead of using it on me, he drew it shallowly across the back of his arm. 

The blood that seeped out was close to the color of human blood, but a little more purple. 

I realized I’d never seen him with an injury before.

“My body usually heals my injuries automatically,” he said. “Like yours, but it takes only seconds or minutes for all but the most serious injuries, whereas human bodies take days to weeks. I have now suppressed my self-healing — another thing my body can do that human bodies can’t. I want you to try to heal this cut.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea how,” I complained. 

“You don’t need to know how, any more than you need to know how to heal your own body,” he said. “Just do what comes naturally.”

So I took his arm, looked at the shallow wound, licked it. His blood tasted coppery like mine, but with a sweet undernote, as if it were partly made of honey. 

The wound closed immediately.

“You must not have suppressed your healing after all,” I said with disappointment. 

“My self-healing didn’t do that. You did that.” 

I still found it hard to believe. “So I can heal a wound by licking it?”

“You know I can do it. Why don’t you believe you can?”

“I don’t know. Do I have to lick them?”

“Let’s try your fingers next.” He slashed his arm again, a little deeper this time. Yes, my fingers worked. 

During the next weeks, his attendants brought injured and sick animals back to the compound. I found I could heal most cuts, burns, broken bones, and infections. I could heal some diseases, but not all. Cancer, for example, was beyond me. (Aeus said even he could only heal some kinds of cancer.) It was easier for me with smaller animals — birds, mice, small snakes. Healing larger animals, such as the sand fox, left me drained for the rest of the day.

“Was this what it was like for you, when you healed my broken ankle, in the pit?” I asked Aeus after one day’s practice had left me bedridden with exhaustion the next. 

“I taxed myself to the limit,” said Aeus. “As I’ve said, I was already so starved I was in snake form all the time. Your injury was serious. That was why I had to feed on your terror and reluctance. Those are more nourishing to me than pure pleasure, especially when I’m in snake form, and I didn’t know about your ability to combine pain and pleasure. I was sorry I had to force you that way, to give you no choice. But it seemed a lesser wrong than letting you die or be captured.”

The word ‘choice’ gave me pause.

“I wouldn’t have understood a choice,” I said. “I was your Gift, and that meant you could do anything you wanted to me.”

“Yes,” he said. “That aspect of your Temple’s training. It makes things easier for me, but it also bothers me.”

I saw now another way I had changed. My complete submission as a Gift had been my very essence. But now it bothered me too that I had been trained so. 

I still gave my will to Aeus utterly when he fed on me and hurt and pleasured me. But in the rest of our lives together, our relationship was more like that of a mentor and student. He knew more than I did, he had powers I did not have (or had in only rudimentary ways). But he treated me as an equal. 

And we were in love.

What if he’d been different? What if he’d wanted a servile Gift? What became of all the other Gifts the Temple bestowed on the Dark Gods?

My mind was bursting with questions again. Some of them I still felt uncomfortable bringing up to Aeus. Like “where did your people come from?” and “will I ever be able to visit the city and the Temple again?” I had asked them before, and he’d not answered.

“Madan,” he said. “If you can heal others now, there is something else you might be able to do.”

“What’s that?” I asked, suddenly alert. He’d used a tone of voice that meant “serious topic ahead.”

“You might be able to receive nourishment from me the way I can from you. Through your emotions, your reactions.”

“You mean—? How do I do that?”

“When we are together, you can sense my feelings. When you do, pull them or suck them toward you.”

His face held that expression I loved, of utter wonder. I knew what it felt like, the wonder that it was possible for such perfection to exist, the way we could complete each other in our couplings. 

He leaned over to kiss me.

I fell into a state where nothing existed but me and him and something we held between us, something we created when we were together. My feelings spilled out of me — awe, and yielding, and longing to be taken. And then I could sense his too — the anticipation of receiving my ecstasy and pain. Gratitude. Dark desire.

I tentatively drew on them, sucked at them. 

I had my eyes closed to better focus, but I knew anyway when it happened. I opened my eyes and found that he had broken the kiss and was staring down at my body as if he’d never seen it before.

I looked down at myself too, and then I knew the reason. 

My body was glowing with light.

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings:  
> Characters in their late teens have sex with each other.  
> Sex between a human and a god in snake form.  
> Some sexual interactions between a human and a god have noncon/dubcon elements.  
> Brief cutting scene (for science).  
> Brief graphic description of a crushing death and a poisoning death.  
> Injured animals are mentioned (none die).


End file.
